Petal by Petal
by spectroscopes
Summary: Clark and Lois, finding each other. An introspective.
1. I: Martha

**Rating:** PG  
**Spoilers:** Let's say through all aired episodes, to be safe.  
**Summary:** Clark and Lois, finding their way.

**I  
Martha**

There is something of cinnamon in Martha's apartment: it is not the Kent Farm — there are no dough and jam-stained cookbooks out on the counter — but there is something diffuse and sunlit about the place; something of fresh coffee and shrewd business sense, and half-finished copies of _Orlando_ on the bedside table.

I wonder what Martha thinks about now that she has flown the nest she built; the wife and mother cast aside, the cosmopolitan of her youth reborn in her stead. To lose Jonathan, to become a Senator: was that a Pyrrhic victory? No doubt she took that old copy of _Huckleberry Finn_ and put it out next to her own book, and thumbed through it time to time, held the pages to her nose and breathed them in. No doubt she wouldn't sleep without knowing where it was.

"Clark's sorry he couldn't come," I say. "He's on assignment."

I am sitting at the kitchen table, my hands laid flat against the cool surface. Martha sets a cup of coffee down in front of me, and then sits with her own at the other corner. She regards me with a half smile.

"Don't worry about Clark. He comes up here more often than you think."

I press my eyelids together. This is the first time I have come to visit Martha in three years. I can see Clark seated across from me, making my excuses to her: Lois is in Kabul; Lois is in Geneva; Lois is in London. Even now I came trailing politicians; not because Martha bade me, and I regret that, I regret the indifferent, unforgiving truth of the sentiment.

It is not that I don't love her. There is a kinship between Martha and myself, an understanding. She unmakes me in the space before her soft, astute, finely-lashed eyes: she knows me; she becomes me. I love her for that, and fear her; I make her my mother, and I distance her from me.

Her hand is on my shoulder. "It's good to see you, Lois."

- - -

There is a photograph of me I have never seen before on the mantle amid the pictures of Jonathan and Clark. I am working alone at my desk in the night; my eyes are turned down, my mouth seems sad. In looking at it, I feel an echo of what I know I felt when it was taken. I feel alone.

"Clark gave that one to me," Martha says, seeing me linger over it. "Jimmy took it."

My fingers tremble a little. I wonder why Jimmy would give Clark a picture of me.

- - -

"You know that I asked Clark to send copies of the Daily Planet since I moved up here."

I am half-dreaming, my head resting on her shoulder; Martha is stroking her long fingers through my hair, pulling it back behind my ears. I have a vague recollection of my own mother doing the same when she was still alive, and the vaguer sense that I am perhaps too old for a little girl's comfort.

"You two have been printing a lot of stories together lately," she says very softly.

"You know Clark;" I say, with only half of my heart, "someone has to hold his hand."

"I think you underestimate him," she says.

No; but that's not what she means. What she means is that my understanding of Clark is incomplete.

"I think he underestimates me."

- - -

I have always had nightmares. There is one about bloodied fingers trying to close wounds hewn in stone. There is one where every ashen body at the morgue is someone I know and love.

I had that one while sleeping at night at the Daily Planet. I opened my eyes when it was over, and sat there, muscles stiff, in my chair, feeling that I would throw up. It was nights like that, when Clark was out alone trailing a story, that my thoughts turned to the macabre, to darkened corpses and boney fingers.

When did I become the concerned wife? When did it start to matter where Clark was, alone, in the middle of the night, when Clark was probably out interviewing paramedics for some story which would prove too mundane to print?

It was at that point that he entered, and I caught a glimpse of him from across the room before he realised I was there. He was carrying within him some idea about himself — some low-shouldered, deep-socketed lie about the nature of his being — and I felt my fingers ache to brush the hair back from his eyes, to touch his lips and reassure him that I understood him.

Then he had looked up at me, his eyes burning black like he would never forgive himself, and what could I do?

It wasn't my choice to love Clark.

He swept into my heart with the autumn wind, eddying the brown-red leaves and breaking the silvery cobwebs of my heart; he was unexpected, bringing with him cool sunlight and then stinging rain, and not seeing anything in himself to love but gently asking it nonetheless — so I love him, for his big rain-filled eyes and kite-flying hands; because he asked it; because I couldn't refuse.

- - -

"Before you go," Martha puts my shoulder bag down by the rest of my luggage. "I have something for you, Lois."

I deflect: "Mrs Kent, seriously — you shouldn't have."

She smiles back at me, "Oh, I didn't. Here:" and she picks up a small box from the counter and opens it, drawing out an old silver locket on a chain. It is inlaid with pearl, like an iridescent oval moon, but otherwise plain.

"This has been in my family for a few years;" she says, "it's not worth anything, but you know that Jonathan and I never had any daughters, so I would like you to have it, Lois."

I look at the locket: it is worn, and loved, and I think that at one point Martha carried the essence of her being around in it. I love it because it is hers, but I do not need that much space to carry myself in.

"I — thanks, Mrs Kent, but isn't there someone else you could save this for? —"

I am careful about the next sentence, but I know that Martha, who loves and knows me, who unravels me in her eyes, understands that I think of it as Lana's already. "I just — Clark's going to settle down eventually, you know."

Martha just smiles, in that wistful Martha way, and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. "I would have loved to have had a daughter like you, Lois." And how could I refuse her then? Her without a daughter; me without a mother: I took the locket. Lana had so many other things I love; she could spare me this one.

"Howcome you and Mr Kent never adopted any more children?" I ask, turning the locket over in my hand, and Martha seems to think on the answer.

"Well," she says carefully, "we thought about it. But Clark was quite a difficult child to raise in a lot of ways."

I raise an eyebrow, "Clark difficult? But he's so ... strait-laced."

"Oh, I don't mean that he was misbehaved," she laughs. "But Clark was an unusual child. Jonathan and I just thought that — well, that it would be better not to unsettle him."

They had sat together in the kitchen, then, Martha and her little boy — she thinking about daughters and loving Clark too much to foist them on him. Maybe she brushed his hair out of his eyes in the same way she had done mine, and out of that small gesture all that was soft and gentle about him blossomed; and in kissing his forehead, she planted a seed from which the flower of his sensitivity later grew.

"I did sometimes wonder, though," she said, with a sense of regret. "I think Clark would have liked some brothers and sisters. In fact," she smiled again at me here, "I think Clark was a little jealous of you."

"Because of Lucy?" The idea is incomprehensible to me.

"Because of Lucy," she repeats, "and because of Chloe. But he would never admit to jealousy."

No; I suppose he wouldn't. But the idea is strange to me, that Clark could have been filled with the same sense of longing for my siblings as I had for his parents. And Chloe — well, I have been jealous of him because of her, but I suppose it is a different thing to have someone's undivided attention as an adult and their kinship as a child.

- - -

"It won't be so long before my next visit," I say, as she kisses my cheek goodbye.

We both know that the fullness of time will make those words a lie.


	2. II: Memories

**II  
Memories****  
**

- - -

_Home is where one starts from. As we grow older  
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated  
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment  
isolated, with no before and after,  
But a lifetime burning in every moment_  
— T. S. Eliot

- - -

I never scratched out a place in the dirt and made memories there.

That's why I came back to the Daily Planet and not my apartment.

I don't hold any false sentiment about this building: this is not my 'home'; this is not my desk. A hundred ghostly fingers danced over keyboards and scratched notes in its dirt before I came here. Like me they pressed their names like flowers between newspaper pages and hoped they would keep; like mine, the flowers of their names were crumpled up and thrown away.

They made love to their work on my desk, slow and laborious. In the night they would whisper their poetic aspirations and brush their ghostly fingers over their lover's skin; press the rosebud of their lips to their lover's eyelids and consider that the flowers of their mouths would wither and die in the earth of this desk. In the morning they were only reporters — no longer idealists; in the morning every one of them was Hunter S. Thompson.

Night after night I sit with Clark at that desk, listening to the police scanner like a married couple in the middle of the last century might have sat together and listened to the radio. "Why don't you go home?" he would say softly in the early hours of the morning — and what could I say? I am a wandering goddess; I am a vagrant spirit. But most of all, I have never had a 'home' in the way he understands it. I make homes in other people. I will stay.

"What are you doing here?" he says, stirring the air behind my neck.

He smells of apples, and ears of corn, and newspaper print. He works all day and sits up all night in the same clothes, but always he smells of apples and corn and newspaper print. I smell of cheap deodorant and sweat and travel. I taste of coffee.

I breath in, and turn to face him. He is, somehow, genuinely surprised to see me.

"I have insomnia." I say it like he should already have understood; with a shrug, like coming back first to your place of work in the middle of the night after your vacation is the most natural, most usual thing in the world — and he smiles.

"How's mom?"

What does he think I can tell him that he doesn't already know? "Still the coolest person I know. How was your trip anyway? -- Hot shot reporter, what was your first out-of-town assignment like?"

He breathes out slowly. "It was interesting. I can't say I'm not glad to be home, though."

Especially now that I'm here? No; I don't say that. But he smiles anyway, and I wonder if he read my mind.

So we sit down across from each other, because tonight is just like any other night. Just like any other night, the last thing I want is to go back to my apartment alone and lie alone in the dark, fingers twisted in the sheets, drifting in and out of sleep and watching a zoetrope of nightmares flickering before me.

I don't know why Clark stays, but I understand it is not to keep me company. Clark, like Clark does, has his own mysterious reasons for doing things — maybe it is worse to go home to an empty farm filled with memories you scratched out with father and mother, cousin and lover. Maybe Shelby howls all night.

- - -

"Here,"

There is a gentle hand on my shoulder, a steaming cup of coffee in front of me.

"Ugh," I can smell myself. "What time is it?"

"It's seven," he says, leaning against the edge of my desk. "I thought you'd like a couple of hours before the day starts to —" he falters for a moment, and I look at him.

"Go home and take a shower?"

He smiles. I sigh, and rub my temples, then reach for the coffee.

"Would you like me to drive you?" he offers, and I put up a hand. He raises his eyebrows and adds, "You've had like three hours sleep, Lois."

Usually the fact that I am tired would be ample grounds to argue with him, but I feel utterly drained of all my strength somehow. All my joints ache; I feel like my head will never sit straight on my neck again. And it's — sweet, the way he always does this: the way he looks after me in that tender, matter-of-fact way; the way he disarms it with excuses about how much sleep I've had, or whatever.

So I let him close the door behind me as I step into his car, let him glance pointedly at the seatbelt — as if Clark Kent, who drives like an eighty year old woman who has just passed her test, would ever be involved in some kind of traffic accident — and I let him be Clark to me. Because at times like this I let myself feel loved, even by Clark.

"Is — that my mother's necklace?"

I feel my breath hitch. "I — yeah."

His lips part in a smile, and I feel mine spread across my face too like ripples on a flat calm. But it's awkward, after that. There's something awkward, something unsaid about my wearing his mother's necklace, and about his smiling over it.

And I wonder why I never dream moments like this.

- - -

He hovers in the door to my apartment after I have walked in; and I think that if I stand like this, I can look at him using the corner of my eye and pretend it is just the coat stand there, the suitcase where I have left it by the door, which I have mistaken for Clark — Clark, hovering in the doorway as if he doesn't realise that he has a standing invitation to be where ever I am.

"Are you coming in?" I say, as if he is really there. "Or are you going to stand there all day?"

He closes the door behind him, and stands just inside the apartment — and I wonder what I think is happening here; wonder what he thinks is happening here. But nothing is happening here. I am making coffee.

"I missed you," he says, quietly, and suddenly, as if he is looking at me from the corner of his eye and pretending I am just a coat stand, a suitcase, a shadow against the wall. "I —" he breathes in slowly, "always miss you when you go away."

I wonder what Martha has told him about me: Martha who holds my entire vagrant, wandering being in her eyes. Did she call him last night while I was asleep and tell him that she is concerned about me? Did she call him and tell him that I feel alone? Somehow Clark is the first and the last person I want to know those things about me. Somehow he is the first and the last person I want to bury my memories inside.

"I —" I have forgotten all the words I ever knew.

He breathes in, and presses his lips together.

"I missed you as well," I say, my voice faltering in confession. I wouldn't be thinking like this if I had slept more last night, if the world felt tangible and full.

Then, stay, I want to say. We should fall asleep on top of one another; I should twist my fingers in the folds of your shirt and fill myself up with dreams of apples and corn and newspaper print. Your kite-flying hands should be in my hair; my eyelashes should flap like bats' wings against your neck. We wouldn't have to say it. It wouldn't matter.

But it does matter, so I don't say it. I don't say it, and it doesn't happen.

It doesn't happen, and Clark leaves for work, and I sleep alone.


	3. III: I Am the Moon

**III  
I Am the Moon**

Clark is like an ocean.

He sets his coffee down on the desk, like that, very deliberate, and lets his hand fall back to his side. His jaw is set; a muscle in it twitches. There is something of reproach in it all: of me, of himself, of the world: I don't know.

"Care to tell me what's on your mind?" I ask, with levity. He looks at me, his shoulders low and round.

"The call — the attack," he says. "It was a teenage girl. The 'Red-Blue Blur' got there before the police did — somehow lost control of the situation." He took another deep breath, "She's dead now."

"Clark —" I say, but he shakes his head.

"You call him a hero, Lois," he says; his voice is low, dark. It rolls through me. "How could someone so powerful let someone's life slip through his fingers like that?" He stares at me: searching; he seems almost desperate. "How is that possible?"

I don't know what to tell him. There is some strange undercurrent to what he's saying: a river of quiet reproach; of soft, black grief. He asks me questions I would expect from someone like Lex, without the malice I would expect from someone like Lex. But I don't think that he is being fair: Clark, who sees every side to every story; Clark is the last person I expected to ask me this.

"He's not omnipotent, Clark. Or omnipresent, or —"

"Someone died tonight."

I breathe out, and close my eyes. "Someone dies every night, Clark. Not even a superhero can save them all."

"No," he says; and the wave in his eyes swells to meet me. "But he could have saved that one."

- - -

If Clark is an ocean, who or what is the man we have dubbed the 'Red-Blue Blur'?

I think that he is the wind in our sails; I think that he is the newspapers he blew along the sidewalk. He is a voice. He is ours.

"I suppose you heard what happened tonight."

"The girl?" I ask.

"The girl."

"I heard," I say. "Are you OK?"

"Lois," he says, "I can't help you. I can't help anybody. Somebody's daughter died tonight because of me."

I could be talking to Clark again, the way I feel right now.

"Listen to me:" I say. "You have no idea what you've done for Metropolis. OK? And maybe you can't help me; and maybe you couldn't help that girl. Maybe there are a million people you can't help, nobody can help. But don't undersell what you've done, what you've chosen to do. A young girl died tonight, and that's a reality we have to wake up to tomorrow, but it wasn't your fault. Sometimes — sometimes people die."

There is silence on the line, and I add, softly, "Maybe one day we'll wake up and nobody's daughter, nobody's son died in the night. But that's not something even you can do alone."

I wonder what he does when he is not talking to me, when he is not saving people, not failing to save them. Is he a person? Does he have family? — a mother, maybe, who has all of my articles pressed liked flowers between scrapbook pages; an old girlfriend. When I hang up the phone, will he go home like me to an empty apartment? Will he go to work?

He must be haunted by death.

"I'm sorry," he says, "for calling you like this."

Maybe I am the wrong person for this. I lack the quiet understanding of someone like Lana; the cool empathy. I see the blueness on the sea surface, and nothing of its depth.

"You're apologising to me?" I ask. "Don't. This is the least I can do for you."

"But — it's so much," he says, after a moment.

- - -

I go home and throw my keys on the counter. It is early, for me.

Somehow, I am filled up with the desire to call Martha. I want to tell her she should be here, that I am all alone, that I need her. I brush my fingers against the receiver — but she's not mine. I let them fall again.

I am angry at Clark. It is easier now that he is not here. I am angry with his unreasonable demands of omnipresence; with his expectations. We are all sailing an ocean of sorrow; we are all sinking; we are all trying to bail our ship the best we can, and Clark expects the man with the largest bucket to bail the whole ship alone.

But —

But when Clark sees someone fall overboard, he is the first to jump in after them. He jumped in after me. He took a bullet, and his eyes overflowed; so did mine. Now he sits alone in the dark of the basement at work, waiting for the next story to come through the wire, the next chance to throw himself into the sea, and filled to overflowing with silent despair — and now I understand. The reproach, the soft black grief is for himself: because the Red-Blue Blur couldn't save a young girl tonight, what good are any of us? What good is Clark, in the face of that?

Clark, you don't understand at all.

- - -

He sits there at his desk, in the dark like I thought. His hands flat against the wood, like they have made roots in its earth. Clark is not like the rest of us, I think; we who are anonymous, we who are ephemeral, we whose names are like dried flowers. Clark is a great oak tree; he has planted the seed of his name in the _Planet_'s dirt, covering it over gently with his hands, watering it with his ocean.

He half-turns to face me, his mouth half-open.

"You came back," he says, and then blinks. "I mean — I thought you went home."

"I did." I say, "But then I started thinking, you know: I'll never get out of the basement if I make going home before ten some kind of habit."

I walk over to his oak tree of a desk and put the carrier bag I have been holding down on it. "And I stopped off for Chinese food on the way, so I am really glad you're still here."

He looks up at me, and the ocean in his eyes is a flat calm. I might set sail in the curve of his mouth; that half moon, that petal. He might set sail in mine.

"My mom called," he says, as I rustle around in the bag. I pause for a moment; my hands still. "She said to tell you 'hi'." I smile at him: I'm not alone. He looks away quietly, to the next desk. Then he presses his lips together, and he says, "And I'm supposed to give you something."

I stop then, and look at him, eyebrow raised. He considers me for a moment, and then pushes his chair back from the desk, standing before me. He puts a hand on my shoulder gently, running the fingers up the fabric of my shirt, pressing them lightly into me. Then he leans forward and presses his lips into the left corner of my mouth; I feel his soft lashes brush against my cheek, and he smells like apples: always apples. I close my eyes.

When I open them again, he is watching me; then he looks away, to the left of my eye, his fingers still pressed into me — and says, as an afterthought, as if to himself, "From my mom."

I smile. "That's why I let you."

I think it might even be true.


	4. IV: Fruit Tree, Fruit Tree

**IV  
Fruit Tree, Fruit Tree**

It didn't matter what Clark said, I always expected to see Lana again.

I looked up before he did; I saw her in the doorway first, and we shared one wordless glance.

Lana. I think we were almost friends there, for a moment. But Lana and I are too different to be close: I am furled tight over myself like the sails of a ship on a stormy sea; Lana is opened like a night-bloomer. Lana is the only person more sensitive than Clark: I understand why he loves her. I liked Lana long before I loved Clark, and I never stopped liking her because he loves her and never me.

But I wasn't glad to see her.

He flinched, and she looked down with her soft dark eyes and whispered, "It's OK." And they left.

They left, and I realise now I never should have entertained the thought that Clark could love someone else — could love someone who was furled tight around her shortcomings. I sewed together that fantasy from whole cloth and laced it into my back, between my shoulder blades, like a pair of waxwork wings. I flew up to the hot, heavy sun, and like a bird shot down I fell at Clark's feet.

- - -

Tess Mercer sweeps into the newsroom like she owns the place. I suppose she does.

In truth, I prefer her to Lex.

"Where is Clark?" She directs the question at me, but I don't know where Clark is. He is making love to Lana somewhere, I think; his hands are trembling; he is brushing the hair back from her eyes. I don't want to know.

"I'm not his mother," I say without looking at her, and from behind I hear the sharp, derisive intake of breath.

The lamp on my desk flickers. I close my eyes.

"Come on, Lois," she says, flatly (but I hear the smirk). "I was starting to think you two came as a set. I got you matching nameplates." (there must be a half-smile, an eyebrow arch). I know Tess Mercer like no other.

"Tess," I say, "everybody got matching nameplates. It's called corporate branding." But I don't smile at her: I forget, and I don't smile, and in my failure to smile is contained all the thoughts and apprehensions of Lana's return.

- - -

I have a recurring nightmare.

In the nightmare, my ribcage cracks open and a tree grows out of it, and on the branches of the tree are the sticky-sweet fruits of all the things I wanted to keep to myself.

And Clark planted the seed with his oak tree hands.

- - -

The last person I expected to see again was Lana, rain-soaked hair slicked down the sides of her face, dripping in the hall outside my apartment. Her fingers touch the wood of my door frame, as if to steady herself.

"I know," she says softly, "we've never really been friends." She presses her lips together, before adding, "Can I come in?"

We sit in silence with steaming coffee around my kitchen table, and it occurs to me that maybe Lana is as lost and alone as I am.

I know that Lana has made mistakes; I know that she has taken missteps that have hurt people I love. But I cannot pretend to know her as well as Clark, and Clark would never reproach her, so why should I? There is a soft and quiet remorse about her now, in the way she curls her fingers around the cup, in her mouth as she blows away the steam. Lana knows that she has made mistakes. I know that I have made mistakes. There is some mutual understanding between us, and I think in some ways we can't be that different. We both loved Clark, after everything.

"I'm not staying in Smallville," she says eventually, and I look up at her swiftly.

"Why? I thought —"

"There's nothing left for me here," she says, picking up a teaspoon and stirring the contents of her cup. "I thought, maybe — but I think now that things were never really supposed to go the way I had planned."

"You're talking about Clark," I say, and she shakes her head.

"Not just Clark. I — never thought my life would turn out quite like this."

I wonder how Lana did think her life would turn out; somehow it's hard to imagine that she dreamed of being a farmer's wife. But then, Clark is not just a farmer. And how did Clark think his life would be? And me? I didn't plan my life at all.

"I don't think it's bad," she says after a moment. "I think this is how things were supposed to be."

- - -

I sometimes think that Smallville is like a toy town. The sun lies flat against the sky above it all year round and everything from the people to the corn is edged in gold. It is almost over-real, almost too authentic. But at night the skin of hot air peels away and the raw, sticky wound of a town is exposed.

I don't know why I came here. There is nothing left for me in Smallville either.

The lights are off. But I know Clark.

- - -

"Smallville,"

He turns his head, and his lips part. "Lois?"

"I saw Lana," I say, and he nods in understanding. "Are you OK?"

He shifts a little on his feet, and smiles at me — and somehow I think I have taken my wax wings in my hands again; I think I am exposing my back to him and asking him to lace them up. He would be gentle; he wouldn't yank. His fingers would brush over my skin, and I would think I knew him from the inside out.

I once rushed to him when Lana left Smallville. I once gathered him up in my arms and grew like a tree around him and in between his ribs to stop the cage of them from cracking open. Now he steps towards me and — and then stops himself.

"I'm glad you came," he says, as I say "I know you like to be alone."

"And I'm glad I saw Lana," he adds. I don't ask him why.

"When she showed up at work like that," I say, "I thought —" and then I falter. I don't really want to say what I thought.

"It was confusing," he says. "But things have changed. It was good to see her, in the end."

- - -

I stay late, to talk, and somehow end up sleeping on his couch again.

And I dream that someone pressed a warm mouth to my temple, and with trembling fingers brushed the hair out of my eyes, and from there all that was sensitive and warm about me blossomed, unfurled softly in the night.


	5. V: Time's a Crooked Bow

**V  
Time's a Crooked Bow**

Oliver's apartment in Star City smells like clean linen and fresh coffee, and a vague sense of shouldn't-be-here. Like his apartment in Metropolis, and the one in London, it is impersonal: minimalist. My own apartment is Spartan, but I have never considered it sterile. Even so, there is a photograph of me on the desk — I don't think he has been up here himself for a while.

It would be so easy to slide back into things with Oliver. My hips slip between his hands like they are an old pair of jeans now. I could slip back into them, and he would peel the layers of me; I would strip the layers of him, my bit-down fingernails dug into his flesh. There would be no more Green Arrow, no more Oliver Queen. There would be no more Lois Lane, cub reporter. We would be Ollie and Lois again. It would be easy.

It would be easy.

That's how I know I don't love him anymore.

I don't want fingers to strip me now; I don't want to be pried apart. I want to bloom suddenly, violently, time-lapsed, coaxed. Oliver cannot coax.

He isn't here, anyway. He is wherever the Green Arrow is. I came for a story.

- - -

I came for a break.

- - -

I came to be free of Clark's gentle coaxing.

- - -

Martha told me that she heard I was still travelling a lot. I didn't need to wonder who told her.

"And I think that's great," she said, while I waited for the inexorable 'but' —

"But I think you could do with putting down some roots."

And what she meant by that is that I have already. I wanted to tell her, though, that I do not have roots: I am impermanent. Like dried flowers, I am blown by the wind. I am not an ocean; not an oak tree. But I didn't, because I am starting to wonder if — to wonder if maybe I am not as impermanent as I think.

- - -

I think that Clark's voicemail messages are always so short because he is afraid that I will pick up, or afraid that I won't. They are perfunctory. I don't answer because they are perfunctory. But when I call him — when I call him we fight. We fight, and it's like the sky has been cracked in half and an ocean poured out; I send my bolts of lightning rustling down the telephone line, and he answers with a clap of thunder. There are anemones in Clark's ocean.

But when I hang up — I hang up, and I feel better.

And half an hour later, he leaves a message on my machine. Soft. Perfunctory. "Lois, I'm sorry".

And then I miss him.

- - -

There is a photograph of Clark in the desk in my apartment. It's a photograph I took without thinking, having happened to borrow Jimmy's camera. I had found Clark in the barn, fixing the tractor, and lifted the camera to my eye almost without noticing. I took the picture just as he turned to face me, and afterwards liked to think I had captured something of his unguarded self as he realised I was there.

- - -

He picks me up at the airport this time. I think we have done something a little like this before. This time the weather is perfectly dry.

I think that if this had happened three years ago, we might have hugged. I feel like we have lost something in all the not-so-accidental touches, those brushes of finger tips, those bumps and knocks; somehow that we no longer touch each other deliberately. I think too that if Clark had hugged me then, I would gently have unfurled every petal of myself for him.

I notice too that I let him chauffeur me around a lot lately.

- - -

He drops me at my apartment, and we are in this moment again. We are to part, and he is to go to work, and we are not going to act like friends and hug each other but pretend that we are too stand-offish for that. I can't — I can't stand it. I can't stand his gentle eyes in the hall like that; I can't stand them when they turn to leave.

"Clark," I say, and he turns back then. I step forward, then, to hug him, throwing my arms around his shoulders, and his hands somehow are on my back, fingers laid back against my spine. As I pull away, he turns his head softly and — I think without thinking — kisses my cheek a goodbye.

I turn my face to his then in half-surprise, and we regard each other, and an oak tree bursts through the cage of my ribs. Then his mouth is on mine — not gentle, but pressed hard into me — and we collapse back against the wall. I feel his fingers twisted up in the fabric of my shirt, digging painfully into my back, in between my shoulder blades. Hands fumble, brush against my stomach: he is mine. His coal black hair; his long fingers; his ocean. His every breath is the frame of a time-lapsed photograph, warm and tickling against my throat. I kiss his cheekbone, his eyelid, his mouth. He kisses mine.

His arm is curled around my waist, like a bird's wing jutted against the cold. His neck is against my cheek, my mouth pressed against his collarbone, my hand resting against his shoulder blade. I don't know how we are going to brush this off.

But it's me, in the end, who pushes gently against his shoulder. He gives way, and we regard each other again for a moment. There is nothing I want more than to rock up on the balls of my feet and kiss him again — but I am filled up with the sudden pressing need to understand that he is _not mine_.

"I — don't know why you did that, Smallville," and, crucially, _he_ kissed me.

His mouth parts, and he frowns. "Lois —" but I hold up a hand.

"I know that you've missed me, and I suppose I missed you, and it's only natural that, you know, that that will come out in — in certain ways. But I think that, maybe, we should just — just not." My voice breaks more than I would have liked. And his eyes: the look in his eyes. I don't know what I expected: maybe that just this once he wouldn't take the out I offered him. And for a moment there, it seemed like —

"OK," he says, after a long moment. He presses his lips together and adds, more to himself, "OK." Then he looks back at me: "I'll see you later, Lois," as if it is me who has decided this; as if — almost as if it mattered. I almost want to grab his hand then, and pull him back, grow roots around him. But I don't. Instead I close in on myself, tight, and (so) he leaves. And I wonder if I really will see him later.


	6. VI: Crowsflight

**VI  
Crowsflight**

- - -

_nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals  
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture  
compels me with the color of its countries,  
rendering death and forever with each breathing_  
— E. E. Cummings

- - -

I see Clark again, but only in the days. I stay late at night at the Daily Planet, but he no longer stays with me.

We hardly speak in the day, and I stay late at night, and I think that I will never be friends with Clark again. We pushed out in a little boat onto open water; and I had thought I could turn it around, and sail us back into harbour, and find everything I left unchanged. But I couldn't. Things are different between us now; things will always be different.

And I don't know what to do with the broken wing of my heart.

I sit alone in the dark, listening to the police scanner like a concerned wife; like a widow in the middle of the last century might have sat alone and listened to the radio. I wonder if Clark still goes out night after night; if he has buried his corpse in his work. No. I can't bear that thought. I won't have that dream again; I won't have Clark digging his own grave over me.

I get up with the next whispering over the wire, and pick up my coat.

I never once stopped to consider that I was doing the very thing which frightens me so much about Clark.

But it wasn't recklessness which brought me here, because I don't even make it to the site of the call. Three blocks away I feel myself shoved from behind, and I realise in a sudden as my face hits the wall that I am being mugged.

(This always happens at the worst moment.)

I snatch my purse back from the man, and we struggle up against the wall for a minute — but even I would have let him take my things, if I had known that he had a gun. But before I realise, it explodes against my side, cracking the cage of my ribs, and I fall back.

He's gone even before I realise I am shot, sliding down the wall with the sticky blackness of my own blood all over my hands.

Then Clark is here out of nowhere, enveloping me in the vastness of his ocean; drowning me in his sea. His arms grow around me like branches and his hands stem the spilling of my guts. I close my eyes against him and breathe him in. It doesn't hurt.

- - -

I wake in the hospital, not alone for once.

Clark is there: for the first time he looks exhausted; he looks like the ocean flowed out of him and left him dried up on the shore. But it was me an ocean flowed out of. My head feels like it is filled up from the inside with arsenic, with ache. I look at him, and he looks at me, and I try to smile at him but he doesn't smile back.

"You nearly didn't make it," he says, with unrelenting honesty — but his hands are clenched white and tight like his jaw. "You nearly died."

I think he was more tender to me in my sleep. Hands warmed my fingers, and fingers brushed hair out of my eyes.

"My mom came down to see you," he says. "She's at home now, sleeping." His voice trembles. "You really frightened — her."

I think of Martha, then, sat by my bedside and thinking that she has lost too many of the people she loved. I think of her alone at the Kent farm, where her husband took his last breath, where she said goodbye to her son, where she scratched memories deep into the rock and the caves and watered the seeds of them with her grief, and fatigue, and her happiness.

When I look back at Clark, he is watching me with some strange expression. Then he leans forward, and wipes the tear from my cheek with his thumb, as if — it's OK. Then he stands back and bites back on his jaw. "Sorry," he says. I press my lips together.

"Thankyou," I say, and my voice sounds choked. "Thankyou for — for coming to my rescue. I don't know how you — but you did."

He looks down and nods, then turns to leave. He stops at the door for a moment before opening it; for more than a moment.

"What would I have done," eventually he says softly to the air, "if you'd died?"

Then he leaves.

- - -

I leave a week later. (Clark got better more quickly.)

I throw my overnight bag down on the sofa and sit beside it. I almost had a thought there in the hospital which would have closed my throat and filled my eyes; I stopped myself in time. But I am alone now, and free to think anything, and inside my ribs is all dank and cold. I wrap my arms around myself. The hole in my side aches. And I think, if things keep up this way with Clark, I might have to leave. Because I can't bear this.

I have never felt so alone in my life.

I curl up on the sofa on my side and lie still. My face is so heavy I think it will fall off, and slide onto the floor. And then what would become of me? I would have become the one thing I was most afraid of being: anonymous.

There is a soft knock at the door, but I lie there for a minute. On the second knock I sit up, and call out, "It's open."

It's Clark. He closes the door behind himself carefully, and then stares at me from across the room. "I went to pick you up at the hospital," he says; "but they told me you had already left. I thought —" he looks away.

"I came to see how you were," he says eventually.

"I'm fine," I say, and it comes out more abrupt than I meant.

His eyes linger over my hand on my side, and I feel like he is peeling the layers of my skin. He nods after a moment, to himself, and says, "I wanted to talk to you too, Lois."

He walks into the apartment, and sits on the sofa next to me. "I don't want to fight," he says, and I smile at him: no promises. He sits there, looking down into his hands, for several protracted minutes, pressing his lips together and breathing in apprehensively. "I should apologise for kissing you," he says eventually. "But I'm not going to."

He glances sidelong at me, and I frown.

"I know I should," he says, "but I can't. Because, Lois, I needed to tell you — I needed you to know something. It was important that you knew. But I couldn't say it." He looks away again, across time and oceans, "I shouldn't say it."

I think the hole in my side has burst at the seams; I can't breathe. I press my eyelids together. "I can't do this," I say. I stand up. "I can't do this." My hand is shaking, but I point at him anyway. It is a command: I can't do this. He stands up and faces me.

"I don't want to fight," he says: an order to match my command.

"What, then?" I say, and I shout like I'm speaking into the wind; like I am the wind. "What is it that's so important that I know? What could you possibly have to tell me, Clark?"

He looks me directly in the eye. "That I love you," he says. I feel my sails slacken. "I love you," he says again, "and I probably shouldn't, but I can't _not_. I love you because — you don't want me to; because you push, and you push, and you don't want anybody to love you because you think there's nothing there to love and because you're wrong."

I almost fall then, and that would have cost me my self-respect. I almost fall like one of those swooning damsels, but I don't. I step back instead, but I don't say anything.

"You're speechless," he says, with a humourless smile. "That's never good."

I close my eyes, as if I can stop time, as if by closing my eyes I can keep things like this and decide. There is a bird in the tree in the cage of my ribs, beating her wings hard against my rib cage; and the tree would crack open the cage, and the bird of my heart would fly away, wing beat on wing beat. There is a bird in the tree and she is singing into the wind. Clark is still there.

I put my hand on his shoulder then, and lean up, pressing my mouth to his. He bends into me, and I push myself up into him, my fingers in his hair, my hand on his chest. He tastes like apples, and corn, and coffee, and _Clark_. He kisses my neck, and I dig my fingernails into him, and scratch memories into his dirt, and he is pulling me up, and up: he is mine, he is mine, and oh god — "I love you," I whisper against his ear. "I love you."


	7. VII: Lines

**VII  
Lines**

I think that whatever happens now doesn't matter that much.

I know the lines of his skin, and the smell of his hair. I have traced fingers lightly across the bare skin of his stomach, and pressed my lips there afterwards, breathing him in. I have felt his hands laid flat, and then fingers curled against the curve of my hips, lips pressed against the stitches over my ribs. I have kissed his collar bone, his shoulder, his rib cage, and, pushing him down into the bed, the soft curve of his mouth and the lid of his closed eye. _I know him_; know the very seascape of him, and named all the silvery fish in his depths.

He is movement, and meaning, and so am I.

- - -

He sets the coffee down by the bedside table, and I blink open my eyes.

"Clark Kent is naked in my bedroom," I say. I close my eyes again, "Hit my head again."

(I don't need to open my eyes again to know that he is smiling.) "Not this time, Lois. Although —"

"I threw the lipstick out," I say. (He laughs out loud that time).

I feel the mattress pushed down behind me, and then Clark's breath is on my neck, and his arm around my waist, hand on my stomach.

"Can I tell you a story?" he says, his breath tickling my ear. He gently brushes a stray hair out of my eyes. I nod, and feel him sit up next to me. "It's about my parents," he says, "my birth parents."

I lean back against the headboard and look over at him, and he smiles at me. In his face there is a sense of wistfulness, and regret; there is also, in his eyes, the echo of a lie — some sentiment about himself which once lingered about the corner of his mouth. "OK," I say, with a smile, "tell me about them."

"They sent me away," he says, "when I was a baby. To save my life." He breathes in, and closes his eyes, and I realise that he is trembling. "Lois," he says, "it wasn't here. It happened a long way away, on another planet, on the other side of the Milky Way. They put me in a rocket ship, packed me in a blanket, and sent me to Earth for my mom and dad to find and look after."

I swallow; unsure for a moment whether he is insane, or whether I am insane, or whether I hit my head after all, or whether I am dreaming. Then he says, "And I'm the Red-Blue Blur, Lois." And when I look at him, his eyes are filled up with trepidation, and earnesty, and I know that what he's saying is the truth.

"Then," I say, when I find my voice, "it was you, all along. You who saved my life, and you who —"

I can't breathe. I close my eyes, and Clark kisses me, suddenly. I put my hand on his cheek, and realise that there are tears there. "You saved me," he says, his eyes closed, "when I thought I was useless and worthless, you saved me. Without realising what you were doing. Because it is your first instinct to save people. I'm sorry I didn't tell you sooner." He is shaking his head. "I should have done a lot of things sooner."

"You didn't have to tell me at all," I say, putting my hand on his shoulder. Every moment I had ever shared with either Clark or the Red-Blue Blur was cast in a new light; they had depth, and movement, and colour, and meaning which I saw with fresh eyes. "It was all you," I say again.

"Because I love you," he says, and this time I kiss him.

- - -

"Is this weird?" I say, sitting at my table in the kitchen, while Clark makes breakfast.

"Is what weird?" he says, over his shoulder.

"You know," I say, tapping my fingers against the table. "_Us_. Together." He says nothing, but laughs, and I roll my eyes. "I'm just saying," I say, "that you were absolutely the last person I expected to fall in love with."

"I didn't know," he says, "that you were expecting to fall in love at all."

I say nothing for a moment, because I think maybe that he is right, and that it never occured to me. Then I say, serious now, "Well, what about you?"

Clark turns around then, and leans against the counter. "I was in love," he says, with that brutal honesty. "But no, I didn't expect to love anyone aside from Lana, much less to be loved back. And —" he looks away here, "and I never thought that I could be this happy in love without becoming human."

I get up then, and kiss him, and the breakfast is burnt.

- - -

I think, sometimes of Lana, and wonder what she is doing. I think maybe that she couldn't spare me the locket, but then maybe she didn't want it.

I hope that she is happy; I think that she is not.

- - -

Clark stumbles into my apartment one day with blood smeared all down the side of his face. He looks like he is about to break, and I fling my arms around him. He says nothing, but just kisses my neck, his fingers twisted into my hair. "I'm here," I whisper into his ear, "I'm here."

"I know," he says. "You're here."

I lie him down on the bed, and lay my head on his shoulder, and as he sleeps, he cries, and I hold him. And I wonder what he did on nights like this before we were together.

And when he wakes in the morning, he tells me everything.

- - -

We still stay nights at the Daily Planet, listening to the police scanner like a married couple. But when he leaves now, I know that he is safe. I know that nothing about the world is fixed only because I know the lines of his skin, but still I no longer dream of bloody fingers and corpses, but of opened cages, and flown birds, and the leaves of oak trees eddied in the wind; and I wake in the night alone, or with his arms around me, and either way I feel safe.

I think that things will work out, in the end.

_Fin_.


End file.
